She still asks where things go.
That is the detail that gave it away, and it was her own daughter who noticed, at twenty three, home for a weekend and standing in that kitchen watching her mother put mugs away.
"Mum, you have been here twenty years."
She had asked a woman she has known for a decade whether the mugs went on the second shelf. She has put those mugs away perhaps four hundred times.
She is fifty two.
Here are the other things, now that she has started looking, and there are more of them than she expected.
She takes her coat off in the doorway rather than hanging it up, and holds it, and then puts it somewhere temporary. She never takes the last biscuit and she has never once in twenty years opened a cupboard in that building without a reason she could state. When a new person arrives she introduces herself with a slight qualification, as though she were reporting rather than welcoming: I help with the Tuesday thing.
She serves in three places. She is loved. If you polled that congregation about who is essential to it, she would be in the first four names on most sheets.
And she behaves like a woman who has been kindly included and might, at some point, have overstayed.
There was no incident. Nothing happened. Nobody has ever been anything but warm to her and she would say so first and mean it entirely.
She just came in at thirty two from somewhere else, having never done any of this before, and she came in grateful, and grateful is a good way to arrive and a very poor way to live, and nobody told her when to stop.
You know the doorway. Yours may be a family or a workplace. But you know what it is to be genuinely welcomed and to have never quite put your coat on a hook, and to have kept a guest's manners so long that they stopped looking like manners and started looking like you.
Nobody is a guest in the family they were born into
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about confidence it will not touch the doorway.
The pit is not shyness. You are not shy; you stand up in front of that congregation and you are excellent. The pit is a category. You arrived as a guest, correctly, at thirty two, and no event ever moved you out of that category, because the moving is not something a welcome does. A guest can be welcomed indefinitely and remain a guest, and twenty years of warmth has, if anything, made it harder, because a person treated wonderfully as a visitor has no reason to complain and therefore no occasion to notice.
Here is the verse.
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13
Read the mechanism, because it is not admission.
Not admitted. Not accepted. Not welcomed in, which is a thing that happens at a door and can, in principle, be reversed at the same door.
Born.
And a birth puts a person in a family in a way no welcome ever can. Nobody is a guest in the family they were born into. You cannot overstay in it. There is no version of it where you have been kindly included and might one day have outstayed the kindness, because inclusion was never the mechanism.
Take that in the kitchen with the mugs, and know it is not my encouragement, it is what is written. The way in was a birth and not an invitation, and nobody has ever overstayed a birth. John 1:13 rules out every other route by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, which is why the category you have been living in for twenty years is the wrong one.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
I am not going to pronounce on where you stand. That is not mine to do from a page. What I will say is what the verse says about the mechanism, and the mechanism was never a door.
Years after the papers. That is how this goes, and it is not a failure of yours that it has taken twenty.
You are not on loan here, and you were not admitted on terms that can be reviewed. John 1:13 rules out every human route and leaves the whole of it with God, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the birthing, which is not the same kind of thing as being let in.
But it does not move on its own, and this is where I want to be practical, because you are a practical woman and an idea will not shift a doorway.
Do one ordinary thing in that building that only a member would do, and do it without asking.
Not a large thing. Do not announce anything. Open a cupboard because you want a mug. Take the last biscuit. Hang your coat on the hook, on the actual hook, and walk away from it.
That will feel like a small trespass. Notice that word, because it is the exact word, and it is the word a guest uses and a daughter never does.
You were born into this and nobody negotiated it and nobody can reverse it at the door. That is John 1:13 read exactly as it stands, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a person out of a category, and He does that in ordinary weeks, in kitchens, over years, and not by an announcement.
And your daughter in that kitchen. She said one sentence and had no idea what she had done, and it is worth telling her at some point, though not this week.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a category you arrived in at thirty two is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on anybody in that building treating you any differently, and they have been warm for twenty years. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your confidence. How long the doorway takes to go, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Way I take my coat off after twenty years, you are a guest's move and I am not a guest, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 1:13 says born, not of the will of man, but of God, and nobody is a guest in the family they were born into.
- Fear that I have been kindly included and am at risk of overstaying the kindness, you were never possible, and you do not get another twenty years. It is written that the way in was a birth and not an admission, and His Spirit is the one who does the birthing, which no door can reverse.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I am hanging my coat on the hook this week and leaving it there, and I am not asking anybody where the mugs go.
John 1:13
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
